Can You Beat the FTSE 100?
Many investors are confident they could do better by timing their way in and out of the stock market. This is your chance to put that belief to the test against real history.
You'll be handed a £10,000 lump sum and dropped into a ten-year stretch of the FTSE 100, taken from the real record.
From there, every move is yours: stay invested and let your money ride the market, or step into the safety of cash when your nerve says so. Real headlines from the period will scroll past: the booms, the busts, and the moments of panic in between. Each one dares you to act. The challenge is to finish ahead of an investor who simply put their money in on day one and left it there.
Think your timing is better than that? There's only one way to find out.
How the game works
This game is built on real FTSE 100 total-return data in GBP (that is, with dividends reinvested), covering April 2000 to May 2026.
Each time you play, you're dropped into a different ten-year window chosen at random from that history, so no two games play out the same way. While your money is invested, it rises and falls exactly as the market did at the time. While it sits in cash, it earns a steady 1% a year. The headlines that appear are tied to the real events of each period: the dot-com crash, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Brexit vote, the COVID sell-off, and the recoveries that followed.
At the end, your result is compared against a "buy-and-hold" investor who put the same amount in on the first day and never touched it again.
Why it's harder than it looks
In theory, beating the market is simple: be invested when it rises, and in cash when it falls.
In practice, almost no one manages it consistently. The market's best days have a habit of arriving right after its worst, often just when selling feels most sensible. Missing only a handful of them can undo years of patient growth. The urge to act tends to be strongest at precisely the wrong moment. That's exactly what makes this game so revealing.
What the research says
Independent studies such as the S&P SPIVA scorecards consistently find that, over rolling ten-year periods, the large majority of actively managed funds, typically around 80–90%, fail to beat their benchmark index after costs. Studies of investor behaviour (such as DALBAR's Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior Study) repeatedly show that the average investor earns less than the market itself, largely because of poorly timed decisions to buy and sell. Historically, time in the market has mattered far more than timing the market.
At the end of the day, the investors who do best are rarely the ones who trade the most. They are the ones who build a sensible financial plan, fund it with an appropriately diversified portfolio and stick to it through the noise.
If you'd like to talk through what a goals-based, planning-drive approach could mean for your own money, speak to one of our advisers.
For educational purposes only. Based on historical FTSE 100 total-return data in GBP (April 2000 – May 2026), with dividends reinvested. While invested, the portfolio tracks the market; while in cash it earns 1% a year. Past performance is not a guide to future results. This game does not constitute financial advice.
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